Enlarge / A Nintendo-proivded selection of indie games currently out (or coming soon) for Switch. Nintendo hopes lists like these will be much bigger in the future.

Popular first-party franchises and an innovative hybrid hardware design have been key parts of the Nintendo Switch’s sales success thus far. But the system also owes a lot to a wide selection of independent games that has helped round out the library of available titles between marquee releases.

So perhaps it’s not a surprise that Nintendo says it’s interested in expanding the range and number of indie titles on the system going forward. In an investor’s Q&A session this week, Senior Executive Officer Susumu Tanaka said, “In the future, we are looking to release around 20 to 30 indie games on Nintendo Switch per week, and we definitely expect to see some great games among them.”

That range would represent a big increase from the Switch’s current baseline of about 10 games released per week, on average, over the last year (a number that includes indie titles as well as games from major publishers). The Switch’s current rate of new game releases—which is comparable to that on the Xbox One—represents a huge increase from the Wii U era, when that system saw just three releases in an average week during its first year on the market in 2013 (and that number that was padded a bit by dozens of Virtual Console re-releases, to boot).

McKellen: Playing The Part, a new documentary focused on the life of beloved actor Sir Ian McKellen, covers dense topics like acting, activism, and aging. And the nearly 80-year-old McKellen seems to have thoughtful perspectives on all of it, drawing upon his dedication to live theater, his groundbreaking advocacy work for LGBTQA rights in the UK, and his now generation-spanning appeal.

With so much to work with, the film manages to stay interesting even when it’s not perfect. Things go chronologically, and McKellen’s pre-university days feel slow compared to his later life. Director Joe Stephenson also made the unorthodox decision to rely solely on an extended McKellen interview, which delivers great insight but occasionally leaves audiences wanting a broader perspective on important moments (like the actor’s high-profile opposition to a 1988 anti-LGBTQA UK policy proposal called Section 28 or his embrace of big US blockbuster film franchises).

Still, for fans of those blockbuster roles in particular, the final third alone likely justifies a trip to the theater (or an eventual VOD rental). That’s when McKellen finally offers direct insight on X-Men’s Magneto and Lord of the Rings’ Gandalf. And by this point in the documentary, it’s clear each role felt like a logical extension of specific experiences in the actor’s life.

Enlarge / Even at the biggest Marvel Comics-related museum exhibit in the world, currently running in Seattle, WA, Steve Ditko’s presence is limited by his famously reclusive nature. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

New York police confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Friday that one of Marvel Comics’ legendary staffers, Steve Ditko, was found dead in his apartment this week. Ditko was 90.

The creator of Dr. Strange and the original artist (plus “co-creator,” according to Stan Lee) for Spider-Man had been found days earlier, on June 29, and police told THR that they believed he had been dead for two days when he was found. Reports indicate Ditko left behind no family or survivors.

Ditko’s impact on Marvel Comics may only be rivaled by his reclusive nature in later years. After creating and developing Spider-Man with Lee in 1961, Ditko premiered lasting hero Dr. Strange in 1963, and Ditko would continue to write and draw Dr. Strange stories for Marvel until 1966. Disputes over money and friction with Lee reportedly drove Ditko to leave Marvel in 1966, and Ditko shunned the public spotlight shortly thereafter; he gave his last formal interview in 1968, though he continued contributing comics to other publishers.

Enlarge

A recently discovered hole in Valve’s API allowed observers to generate extremely precise and publicly accessible data for the total number of players for thousands of Steam games. While Valve has now closed this inadvertent data leak, Ars can still provide the data it revealed as a historical record of the aggregate popularity of a large portion of the Steam library.

The new data derivation method, as ably explained in a Medium post from The End Is Nigh developer Tyler Glaiel, centers on the percentage of players who have accomplished developer-defined Achievements associated with many games on the service. On the Steam web site, that data appears rounded to two decimal places. In the Steam API, however, the Achievement percentages were, until recently, provided to an extremely precise 16 decimal places.

This added precision means that many Achievement percentages can only be factored into specific whole numbers. (This is useful since each game’s player count must be a whole number.) With multiple Achievements to check against, it’s possible to find a common denominator that works for all the percentages with high reliability. This process allows for extremely accurate reverse engineering of the denominator representing the total player base for an Achievement percentage.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | amesy)

User reviews on Netflix will soon become a thing of the past. According to a CNET report, Netflix will remove user reviews from its service this summer. The removal rollout will happen in stages: by July 30, you won’t be able to write new reviews for shows and movies on the streaming service. By mid-August, you won’t even be able to read existing user reviews.

According to a company email, user reviews saw “declining usage over time.” Netflix is therefore canceling the written reviews, and the company said it has “notified members who have used the feature recently.”

User reviews—both the ability to write them and to read them—have been limited to the desktop version of Netflix. Reviews for individual shows and movies didn’t appear in any of Netflix’s apps, but users could rate programs on the Netflix website and then add written comments.

Enlarge (credit: Marvel Studios)

For some fans, 2015’s Ant-Man was a breath of fresh air after the save-the-world insanity of many other Marvel Studios films. But that comic series’ small-suit, big-screen debut was still glued to Avengers plot lines, which arguably dragged its momentum and fun. (This fact may have caused a rift between Marvel and the film’s original director, Edgar Wright, who was rumored to have a sillier, more standalone film in mind before leaving Ant-Man.)

A few years later, the Avengers side of things is even more insane. Ant-Man was noticeably absent from Infinity War, and this week’s Ant-Man and the Wasp explains why: to give Infinity War haters a silly, one-off antidote. Basically, Wright’s reported vision has finally emerged, one film later.

Everything good about Ant-Man—its heart, its humor, and its brisk take on smaller-scale superhero action—is back and better. By focusing on its best characters, Ant-Man and the Wasp makes room for convincing relationships and character-building; it makes viewers give a crap about its cast… and forgive the film’s few imperfections.

Enlarge (credit: Warner Bros.)

It’s time for a monster-sized mea culpa. Earlier this year, I made the mistake of assuming the worst about Rampage. The April film, directed by Brad Peyton and starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, is based on the arcade games of the same name, which is already a bad start, since that franchise ranks well below the likes of pretty much any other game license ever slapped onto a film. (What, Mr. Do was unavailable?)

And its pre-release hype and trailers consisted mostly of Johnson alternating between agony, screaming, and sympathizing with a giant CGI ape. What hope did this film have?

Turns out, filmgoers had no idea what a treat Peyton and co. delivered. Hindsight is already incredibly kind to Rampage‘s tongue-in-cheek fun and action, and that’s thanks to the triceratops-sized dump that the Crichton empire laid in June with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Enlarge (credit: Games Done Quick)

The week-long Summer Games Done Quick gaming marathon concluded on Saturday after raising $2.1 million for charity. That may very well lead outsiders to ask: What kind of gaming event can raise so much money for a global nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders?

Fans of the Games Done Quick organization, which runs two charity marathons a year, might answer that question by pointing to a slew of “speedruns”—attempts to beat a video game as quickly as possible—for classic and modern titles alike. Or they might start shouting a bunch of inside jokes and catch phrases, which are abundant at such a tight-knit, community-driven gathering of some of gaming’s biggest nerds.

Either way, while the event has since concluded, its most impressive and silliest moments live on thanks to a complete YouTube video dump. Hours upon hours of speedruns, both quick and lengthy, live on at the Games Done Quick channel. So we thought we’d take this American holiday opportunity to help outsiders catch up on the craziness with a few of our favorite full-game clips.

Enlarge / Khali the Killer from Sony Pictures Entertainment. (credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Sony Pictures Entertainment endeavored to post a trailer for its limited-release film Khali the Killer on YouTube to encourage viewers to watch the movie on Blu-ray, on streaming platforms, and in select theaters. Instead, the company uploaded the film in its entirety—apparently by accident.

Khali the Killer is a violent crime drama that, based on the actual trailer, seems to draw a lot of influence from westerns and ’70s exploitation films. It was released on DVD in 2017, but in the odd reverse-order world of some indie films, it’s not slated for a theatrical release until later this year. In any case, this is not an example of the film being unavailable until it suddenly appeared on YouTube.

Clocking in at a feature-length one hour and 30 minutes, the video has since been removed, but it stayed up for several hours. That was long enough to earn a heavily upvoted Reddit thread making fun of the error.

Enlarge (credit: Rainway)

Tens of thousands of Fortnite players have been infected by malware that hijacks encrypted Web sessions so it can inject fraudulent ads into every website a user visits, an executive with a game-streaming service said Monday.

Rainway CEO Andrew Sampson said in a blog post that company engineers first detected the mass infections last week when server logs reported hundreds of thousands of errors. The engineers soon discovered that the errors were the result of ads that somehow were injected into user traffic. Rainway uses a technique known as whitelisting that permits customers to connect only to approved URLs. The addresses hosting the fraudulent addresses—hosted on the adtelligent.com and springserve.com domains—along with unauthorized JavaScript that accompanied them made it clear the traffic was generated by malware infecting a large number of game players using the Rainway service. Rainway is a cloud-based service that lets people play PC games remotely, similar to PlayStation Now.

“As the errors kept flowing in, we took a glance at what these users had in common,” Sampson wrote. “They didn’t share any hardware, their ISPs were different, and all of their systems were up to date. However, one thing did stand out—they played Fortnite.”